Chapter Nineteen – Ryder

 

“H-h-how did I get in here?” Chad asked in a nasal voice as he lay in the middle of the closet floor, frantically trying to wiggle free of his bindings, even as I tried to undo them for him.

“Hold still,” I said, trying to keep the growl out of my voice. I could feel it rising in me, even as I’d almost finished untying him.

He looked as normal as before the transformation. Except for the torn costume, of course. And the blood covering his face, from when I’d had to put him down.

“Why’s my nose feel like shit? And what’s all this white stuff?” he asked. His face blanched as he took in the broken ring of salt surrounding him. “Oh God, was I doing coke again? Did I black out last night or something? I’m not supposed to be doing any more drugs. My dad’ll kill me if he finds out.”

“Don’t worry,” Stephanie said from where she was standing in the doorway behind me, “you weren’t doing coke or anything.”

“But you did black out and get a little crazy,” I said. “How do you feel?”

“Like I got hit by a pickup,” he said, groaning a little. “My head’s killing me. God, how crazy did I get? And what did I do?”

“Well, you ended up here at this after-party,” I continued. “Someone rented out the place as an Airbnb.”

“You had a whole lot to drink,” Stephanie said, arms crossed as she leaned against the door frame and watched me undo the last knot in the nylon rope around his ankles. “Remember me at all?”

Chad looked past me at Stephanie, and nodded a little. “You work at that dive, right?”

She pinched her lips together as she raised her eyebrows. “Yeah,” she said, “right. I own that bar. Remember the alleyway?”

He shook his head. “No. What’d I do? Was I throwing up back there or something? Or were Angela and I going at it back there?” He winced a little as he moved his head. “She gets pretty horny when she’s drunk.”

Stephanie sighed. “No, nothing like that. You should see what you did to the kitchen wall, though. That’s part of the reason why we put you in here.”

I stood up, bundling the restraints in my hands as I backed up to stand next to Stephanie. We stepped out into the hallway together to give him some room.

“Maybe someone slipped something in my drink?” he asked as he sat up, gingerly touching a finger to his nose. “Jesus Christ, that hurts.”

“Probably broken,” I said. “You got into a fight with some dude. Way bigger than you.”

“Swung a cast iron pot at his head,” Stephanie said. “Got it stuck in the kitchen wall.”

Chad looked up at us as we spoke, just quietly shaking his head. “Jesus,” he said, lowering his head down between his knees. When he spoke again, you could almost hear the tears rolling down from his words like fat raindrops. “God, I fucked up. Angela’s going to fucking kill me!”

Stephanie sighed audibly as she shifted from one foot to the other.

He might have been an asshole, based on what he’d said the night before in the bar, but that didn’t necessarily make him a bad person through and through. “It’s okay, though,” I said after a long moment of silence, punctuated by his soft whimpering. “You can stay here for a little while, okay? Until you get your shit together, figure out what’s going on?”

Stephanie touched my hand, got my attention. When I turned to look at her, she gave me a look. “Are you sure?” was the silent question.

I shrugged. What else could we do? If everyone at the concert was like him, we couldn’t exactly let him go back.

“Fuck,” Chad said from inside the closet, still nestled quietly in his little pile of self-loathing. “My ticket! They won’t let me on the grounds without that. Where’d this money come from?”

“You tired, man?” I asked. “There’s a room upstairs that’s empty, and we can help you figure something out.”

“Really? I can crash out for a little while?”

“Sure, why not? I mean, your friends are all at the festival, right, and that’s not over till tomorrow. And it’s still early. Why not get a few hours of shuteye?”

He nodded. “Yeah, sure.” He reached up, touched his nose tenderly again. “You guys got any Advil or anything?”

Stephanie rolled her eyes as I glanced in her direction. “I’ll see what I can do. Why don’t you help him upstairs, Ryder? Show him the room?”

While she went to find him some Advil, and something to wash it down with, I got him out of the closet and upstairs. He asked me questions about the night before, and I just kept making stuff up. It was clear he wasn’t a bloodthirsty monster of the night. He just seemed like a big, lost kid. A man-child whose parents paid for everything and tried to control his life.

Stephanie found us upstairs a few minutes later, and we got some Advil down his throat. We closed the door to his room and headed back downstairs to the kitchen.

“What now?” Stephanie asked, arms crossed over her chest.

“Salt. We need to make another ring, like Tabitha suggested. Just to be safe.”

“Only problem is, I think I used the last of what Christina had.” A moment later, she snapped her fingers. “Wait! I think I know where some might be.” She passed me and went out the back.

“What’s out here?” I asked.

“Andy’s storage shed,” she said, going over to a little wooden structure nestled in one of the corners halfway between the house and the above-ground pool. “He keeps salt here for the winter, just in case.”

I yanked open the shed’s door, and we both peered down at the big, heavy sack of rock salt sitting up against one of the walls. “That’ll do,” I said. I reached down, grabbed the fifty-pound bag, and threw it over my shoulder.

Less than a minute later, we were back in the kitchen, and Stephanie was pulling out a knife from one of the drawers. As I held the bag in my arms, she clipped off the corner so I had a nice pour spout. Standing side by side, I drew an uneven, but unbroken, circle around us on the linoleum floor.

“Now what?” she asked as I, careful not to disturb the ring with my feet, placed what remained of the salt on the kitchen table.

“We wait.”

We didn’t have to wait long, though.

“You feel that?” Stephanie asked as she grabbed my hand. A tight frown dragged her lips down in almost a grimace of discomfort, like she was getting her blood drawn.

“That tingle?” I asked, feeling the strange sensation crawl up and down my spine, and throughout my body. Like my whole face, my ears, my lips, and even my brain had been asleep without my realizing it, and were only now waking up to the world.

She nodded. “Yeah. Wh-what’s that?”

I dropped her hand and put an arm around her waist, pulling her close to my side. “I don’t know,” I admitted.

“Oh God,” she whispered, pulling herself closer to me, her arms sliding around behind my back. “Oh God, Ryder. What’s happening? It’s like it’s in every fiber of me.”

The pinpricks, tingles, and now static shocks and mild tremors passed through us as we gripped each other more tightly, held each other as close as two human bodies could. After a moment, the shaking became more violent, and her lithe arms wrapped themselves more tightly around my torso, as I tried not to crush her with my own embrace.

“Stephanie,” I said, shutting my eyes tightly, lights sparking up and down in the darkness behind my eyelids. I bent down over her, both arms now around her, pulling her close to me.

“Ryder?” she asked, shaking like a leaf, or a scared kitten, in my arms.

And then, it was over. One moment, the sensation was there, and we were alive with discomfort. The next, it’d passed like nothing had ever happened, and we were just two people holding each other in the kitchen, surrounded by a line of salt on all sides.

But, whatever those had been, and whatever we’d just experienced, it was over now.

“I think it’s over,” I said as we continued to hold each other, our breathing loud in my ears.

She gripped me more tightly, her fingers twisting themselves in my borrowed shirt. “Are you sure?”

Whether it was the feeling of her arms engulfing me, or her fingers against my skin, I almost said no. Some part of me wanted to stretch this thread of time out as far as it would go. But, another part of me knew that if I stretched it too far, the thread might just snap.

“I am,” I said, finally, willing myself to let her go.

But my arms betrayed me and just gripped her more tightly.